World’s No. 1 Jailer

No other country on the planet puts more of its citizens in cages for life for nonviolent drug offenses than the USA

by Mark J. Perry

It’s been well-documented that the US is the World’s No. 1 Jailer, and imprisons far more of its people than any other country on the planet (716 per 100,000 population), including countries generally thought to be repressive like Myanmar (120 per 100,000), Iran (284 per 100,000), Syria (58 per 100,000), or Cuba (510 per 100,000). It’s also been documented that America’s cruel and failed War on Drugs, launched by President Nixon in 1971, is largely responsible for the country’s shameful status as the World’s No. 1 Incarcerator, see chart above.

A new report released this week from the American Civil Liberties Union ”A Living Death: Life without Parole for Nonviolent Offenses” examines a very disturbing trend that contributes to America’s notoriety as the World’s No. 1 Jailer – the increasing number of nonviolent offenders in the US who are being sentenced to life in prison without parole. As Reason.comreported “The ACLU found, perhaps unsurprisingly, that the War on Drugs, mandatory minimums, and “tough-on-crime” policies are to blame” for the more than 3,000 prisoners in America serving life sentences without parole (LWOP) for nonviolent drug and property crimes.

Here are some highlights of the ACLU report:

This report documents the thousands of lives ruined and families destroyed by sentencing people to die behind bars for nonviolent offenses, and includes detailed case studies of 110 such people. It also includes a detailed fiscal analysis tallying the $1.78 billion cost to taxpayers to keep the 3,278 prisoners currently serving LWOP for nonviolent offenses incarcerated for the rest of their lives.

Using data obtained from the Bureau of Prisons and state Departments of Corrections, the ACLU calculates that as of 2012, there were 3,278 prisoners serving Life without parole (LWOP) for nonviolent drug and property crimes in the federal system and in nine states that provided such statistics (there may well be more such prisoners in other states). About 79% of these 3,278 prisoners are serving LWOP for nonviolent drug crimes. Nearly two-thirds of prisoners serving LWOP for nonviolent offenses nationwide are in the federal system; of these, 96% are serving LWOP for drug crimes. More than 18% of federal prisoners surveyed by the ACLU are serving LWOP for their first offenses. Of the states that sentence nonviolent offenders to LWOP, Louisiana, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Oklahoma have the highest numbers of prisoners serving LWOP for nonviolent crimes, largely due to three-strikes and other kinds of habitual offender laws that mandate an LWOP sentence for the commission of a nonviolent crime.

The incompetence of our neo-monarchy

Thus Spake Obama 

By Mark Steyn

It is a condition of my admission to this great land that I am not allowed to foment the overthrow of the United States government. Oh, I signed it airily enough, but you’d be surprised, as the years go by, how often the urge to foment starts to rise in one’s gullet. Fortunately, at least as far as constitutional government goes, the president of the United States is doing a grand job of overthrowing it all by himself.

On Thursday, he passed a new law at a press conference. George III never did that. But, having ordered America’s insurance companies to comply with Obamacare, the president announced that he is now ordering them not to comply with Obamacare. The legislative branch (as it’s still quaintly known) passed a law purporting to grandfather your existing health plan. The regulatory bureaucracy then interpreted the law so as to un-grandfather your health plan. So His Most Excellent Majesty has commanded that your health plan be de-un-grandfathered. That seems likely to work. The insurance industry had three years to prepare for the introduction of Obamacare. Now the King has given them six weeks to de-introduce Obamacare.

“I wonder if he has the legal authority to do this,” mused former Vermont governor Howard Dean. But he’s obviously some kind of right-wing wacko. Later that day, anxious to help him out, Congress offered to “pass” a “law” allowing people to keep their health plans. The same president who had unilaterally commanded that people be allowed to keep their health plans indignantly threatened to veto any such law to that effect: It only counts if he does it — geddit? As his court eunuchs at the Associated Press obligingly put it: “Obama Will Allow Old Plans.” It’s Barry’s world; we just live in it.

The reason for the benign Sovereign’s exercise of the Royal Prerogative is that millions of his subjects — or “folks,” as he prefers to call us, no fewer than 27 times during his press conference — have had their lives upended by Obamacare. Your traditional hard-core statist, surveying the mountain of human wreckage he has wrought, usually says, “Well, you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs.” But Obama is the first to order that his omelet be unscrambled and the eggs put back in their original shells. Is this even doable? No. That’s the point. When it doesn’t work, he’ll be able to give another press conference blaming the insurance companies, or the state commissioners, or George W. Bush . . . 

Generation Wait

Share of young adults who move hits 50-year low

By HOPE YEN

U.S. mobility for young adults has fallen to the lowest level in more than 50 years as cash-strapped 20-somethings shun home-buying and refrain from major moves in a weak job market. 

The new 2013 figures from the Census Bureau, which reversed earlier signs of recovery, underscore the impact of the sluggish economy on young people, many of them college graduates, whom demographers sometimes refer to as "Generation Wait." 

Burdened with college debt or toiling in low-wage jobs, they are delaying careers, marriage and having children. Waiting anxiously for their lucky break, they are staying put and doubling up with roommates or living with Mom and dad, unable to make long-term plans or commit to buying a home — let alone pay a mortgage. 

Many understood after the 2007-2009 recession that times would be tough. But few say they expected to be in economic limbo more than four years later. 

"I'm constantly looking for other jobs," says Jeremy Bills, 27, of Nashville, Tenn., who graduated from Vanderbilt University in May 2011 with a master's degree in human and organizational development. Originally from Tampa, Fla., Bills has stayed put in his college town in hopes of finding a job in management consulting or human resources. Instead, he has mostly found odd jobs like pulling weeds and dog-sitting. 

Bills says he pursued a master's degree to bolster his credentials after getting his college diploma in 2008, shortly before the financial meltdown. Instead, he finds himself still struggling financially and worrying that the skills he learned in school — where he incurred $20,000 in student loan debt — are "kind of atrophying right now." 

"It's not like riding a bicycle. You can't just jump into a career position so many years after training," said Bills, who now works at a nonprofit organization making $12 an hour and is looking for a second job. 

Among adults ages 25-29, just 4.9 million, or 23.3 percent, moved in the 12 months ending March 2013. That's down from 24.6 percent in the same period the year before. It was the lowest level since at least 1963. The peak of 36.7 percent came in 1965, during the nation's youth counterculture movement. 

Defining bubbles

Psychology and economics

Dr. Frank Shostak

According to the popular way of thinking, bubbles are an important cause of economic recessions. The main question posed by experts is how one knows when a bubble is forming. It is held that if the central bankers knew the answer to this question they might be able to prevent bubble formations and thus prevent recessions.

On this, at the World Economic Forum in Davos Switzerland on January 27, 2010, Nobel Laureate in Economics Robert Shiller argued that bubbles could be diagnosed using the same methodology psychologists use to diagnose mental illness. Shiller is of the view that a bubble is a form of psychological malfunction. Hence the solution could be to prepare a checklist similar to what psychologists do to determine if someone is suffering from, say, depression. The key identifying points of a typical bubble according to Shiller, are,

1.      Sharp increase in the price of an asset.

2.    Great public excitement about these price increases.

3.    An accompanying media frenzy.

4.    Stories of people earning a lot of money, causing envy among people who aren’t.

5.     Growing interest in the asset class among the general public.

6.    New era “theories” to justify unprecedented price increases.

7.     A decline in lending standards.

What Shiller outlines here are various factors that he holds are observed during the formation of bubbles. To describe a thing is, however, not always sufficient to understand the key factors that caused its emergence. In order to understand the causes one needs to establish a proper definition of the object in question. The purpose of a definition is to present the essence, the distinguishing characteristic of the object we are trying to identify. A definition is meant to tell us what the fundamentals or the origins of a particular entity are. On this, the seven points outlined by Shiller tell us nothing about the origins of a typical bubble. They tell us nothing as to why bubbles are bad for economic growth. All that these points do is to provide a possible description of a bubble. To describe an event, however, is not the same thing as to explain it. Without an understanding of the causes of an event it is not possible to counter its emergence.

Now if a price of an asset is the amount of money paid for the asset it follows that for a given amount of a given asset an increase in the price can only come about as a result of an increase in the flow of money to this asset.

China Eases One-Child Policy

Concession Comes as Labor Shortage Looms

By LAURIE BURKITT

China is tempering its controversial one-child policy, allowing more couples to have a second child in a surprise concession over a much-disliked control that comes as the country faces a looming worker shortage.

Couples will be able to have two children if one spouse is an only child, according to a wide-ranging Communist Party reform blueprint issued Friday, the most significant adjustment in a policy that has defined Chinese family life for more than three decades and perhaps the most dramatic policy change out of leaders' recent party conclave.

Previous exemptions mainly allowed some rural couples to have a second child and ethnic minorities to have more. Couples consisting of two only children were also exempt. The new move expands exemptions to many more couples, chiefly urban ones who have seen their living standards improve and increasingly chafed under social controls.

The shift comes after years of high-level debates and was greeted by those who have been pushing Beijing for change as game-changing.

"It's a historic moment in the life of this infamous policy," said Wang Feng, a demographer at Fudan University in Shanghai.

He and other experts said Chinese leaders also realized that this reform—which comes amid increasingly vocal criticism of Beijing's handling of a number of social issues—was easier to deliver than concrete change on problems such as poor medical care and pollution that have developed amid the country's breakneck growth.

"This is the only concrete policy change," said Cheng Li, an expert on China's elite politics at the Brookings Institution. For the authorities, he said, "It's a very good story."

However, demographers say the shift, in the document charting China's economic course for the next decade,t comes too late to solve a looming labor crisis in a rapidly aging society.

The document didn't say when the new policy will start, saying only that it would "gradually adjust and improve family planning, promoting the development of balanced population."

Venezuela Declares Economic Laws Abolished

It's Been Tried Before …

President Maduro of Venezuela. He reminds us faintly of a bouncer or some other type of enforcer. We wouldn't hesitate to cast him in a movie about the mob. Getting 'protection' from this dude sounds like a slightly scary prospect.

By Pater Tenebrarum

Mish already wrote about the latest escapades in the ongoing Venezuelan crack-up boom/hyper-inflation catastrophe. In the meantime, Bloomberg has updated its original report, noting inter alia that the latest news have provoked a mini-crash in the country's bonds. 

“Venezuelan bonds tumbled, sending yields to a 22-month high, after President Nicolas Maduro dispatched the military to take over a retail chain as part of his effort to quell inflation that’s soared above 50 percent.

The country’s benchmark bonds due 2027 fell 3.9 cents to 72.1 cents on the dollar as Maduro’s seizure of electronics retailer Daka and his warnings to other businesses to cut prices to “fair” levels deepened investor concern that growth is being choked off by government controls. Yields on the bonds soared 0.79 percentage point to 13.82 percent, the highest since January 2012, at 3:19 p.m. in New York.

Maduro, who took over as president this year after his socialist mentor Hugo Chavez died of cancer, is stiffening government-imposed price controls that have contributed to food and goods shortages across the South American country. Maduro blamed the “parasitic bourgeoisie” and said he’d impose limits on profit margins throughout the economy after inflation surged to 54 percent in October, the fastest pace in 16 years.

“In the 20 years that I’ve been managing emerging markets, I have never seen the mismanagement of the scale that I’m seeing in Venezuela today,” Ray Zucaro, who oversees $375 million of emerging-market debt at SW Asset Management LLC in Newport Beach,California, wrote in an e-mailed response to questions. “The government effectively is promoting anarchy. This disconnect with reality, I’ve never seen it bigger than it is now.” 

Venezuela Jails Over 100 "Bourgeois, Barbaric, Capitalist Parasites"

The Land of Plenty

"It's time to deepen the offensive, go to the bone in this economic war," warned Venezuelan President Maduro - echoing Hugo Chavez's iron fist of socialism (and nationalization) before him - as his decision to jail over 100 businessmen is "defending the poor." As Reuters reports, plenty of Venezuelans have applauded his measures, saying price hikes were out of control, while others have expressed fears that Maduro could be uncorking dangerous forces as opposition forces note Maduro's economic policies were "chillingly similar" to those of Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe. Officials say unscrupulous companies have been hiking prices of electronics and other goods more than 1,000 percent. Critics say failed socialist economic policies and restricted access to foreign currency are behind Venezuela's runaway inflation. No matter which, Maduro thundered "They are barbaric, these capitalist parasites!" 

Via Reuters,

Venezuela's socialist government has arrested more than 100 "bourgeois" businessmen in a crackdown on alleged price-gouging at hundreds of shops and companies since the weekend, President Nicolas Maduro said on Thursday. 

"They are barbaric, these capitalist parasites!" Maduro thundered in the latest of his lengthy daily speeches. "We have more than 100 of the bourgeoisie behind bars at the moment." 

...

Officials say unscrupulous companies have been hiking prices of electronics and other goods more than 1,000 percent. Critics say failed socialist economic policies and restricted access to foreign currency are behind Venezuela's runaway inflation. 

"Goodyear has to lower its prices even more, 15 percent is not enough, the inspectors have go there straightaway," Maduro said in his evening address, sending officials to check local operations of the U.S.-based tire manufacturer. 

Like Chavez, Maduro says he is defending the poor.

The U.S. economy is falling into Europe’s footsteps

What the Ice Cream Scooper Told Me in Venice

by Michael Lombardi

I’m blessed to be able to travel to Europe once or twice a year. I use the trips as an opportunity to see how the economies are faring over there. And I can tell you this first-hand: the economic situation in Europe is much worse than what we’re hearing from the mainstream media in the U.S. economy.

Here’s just one small story that paints the picture…

A couple of weeks back, while in Venice for four days, I walked into my favorite ice cream store for my daily fix of Italian ice cream. I’m chatty wherever I travel, as I want to get the locals talking so I learn what’s going on.

After engaging the store’s only employee in conversation (I’m fluent in Italian), the young man, who was between 25 and 30 years old and educated, told me how happy he was to have his job as an ice cream scooper at this particular location of a well-known chain of Italian ice cream stores. “Jobs in Italy are very hard to come by,” he told me.

But what he said next really got me thinking … 

The ice cream scooper said he travels 65 kilometers (that’s about 40 miles) each way to and from work each day. He takes the train. Total travel time is four hours a day; two hours in the morning to get to work, and two hours at night to get home from work. Yes, four hours a day to travel to a job scooping ice cream for tourists.

When I asked him about getting a job closer to the town he lives in, he says there are no jobs to be had. When I ask him about moving closer to his job to cut down on the commute, he says he can’t afford the higher rent.

The discussion had an impact on me. If you are a long-time reader of this column, you have read how I believe the U.S. is headed for the same fate as most eurozone countries: there is no middle class, only the very poor and the very rich.

And it’s already happening in the U.S. economy…

Your Life is Worthless

But police-state employees are invaluable

By Paul Craig Roberts

In my last column I emphasized that it was important for American citizens to demand to know what the real agendas are behind the wars of choice by the Bush and Obama regimes. These are major long term wars each lasting two to three times as long as World War II.

Forbes reports that one million US soldiers have been injured in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. http://www.forbes.com/sites/rebeccaruiz/2013/11/04/report-a-million-veterans-injured-in-iraq-afghanistan-wars/

RT reports that the cost of keeping each US soldier in Afghanistan has risen from $1.3 million per soldier to $2.1 million per soldier. http://rt.com/usa/us-afghanistan-pentagon-troops-budget-721/

Matthew J. Nasuti reports in the Kabul Press that it cost US taxpayers $50 million to kill one Taliban soldier. That means it cost $1 billion to kill 20 Taliban fighters. http://kabulpress.org/my/spip.php?article32304 This is a war that can be won only at the cost of the total bankruptcy of the United States.

Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes have estimated that the current out-of-pocket and already incurred future costs of the Afghan and Iraq wars is at least $6 trillion.

In other words, it is the cost of these two wars that explain the explosion of the US public debt and the economic and political problems associated with this large debt.

What has America gained in return for $6 trillion and one million injured soldiers, many very severely?

In Iraq there is now an Islamist Shia regime allied with Iran in place of a secular Sunni regime that was an enemy of Iran, one as dictatorial as the other, presiding over war ruins, ongoing violence as high as during the attempted US occupation, and extraordinary birth defects from the toxic substances associated with the US invasion and occupation.

In Afghanistan there is an undefeated and apparently undefeatable Taliban and a revived drug trade that is flooding the Western world with drugs.

The icing on these Bush and Obama “successes” are demands from around the world that Americans and former British PM Tony Blair be held accountable for their war crimes. Certainly, Washington’s reputation has plummeted as a result of these two wars. No governments anywhere are any longer sufficiently gullible as to believe anything that Washington says.

These are huge costs for wars for which we have no explanation.

The Bush/Obama regimes have come up with various cover stories: a “war on terror,”“we have to kill them over there before they come over here,” “weapons of mass destruction,” revenge for 9/11, Osama bin Laden (who died of his illnesses in December 2001 as was widely reported at the time).

None of these explanations are viable. Neither the Taliban nor Saddam Hussein were engaged in terrorism in the US. As the weapons inspectors informed the Bush regime, there were no WMD in Iraq. Invading Muslim countries and slaughtering civilians is more likely to create terrorists than to suppress them. According to the official story, the 9/11 hijackers and Osama bin Laden were Saudi Arabians, not Afghans or Iraqis. Yet it wasn’t Saudi Arabia that was invaded.

Democracy and accountable government simply does not exist when the executive branch can take a country to wars in behalf of secret agendas operating behind cover stories that are transparent lies.

I Have Seen the Future, and it Is Idiocy

One cannot not exaggerate the degree to which official idiocy impinges on our lives

by Theodore Dalrymple

Yesterday morning, as I was sitting in the flat on Paris that I have rented for a time quietly finishing my latest book, Murderers I Have Known (and I have known quite a few), a furious row broke out in the street six floors below. I went out onto the terrace—the flat is on the building’s top floor—to see what was going on. There were several other equally curious people standing on their balconies on both sides of the street.

A little knot of young black men, with two or three girls among them, was having a furious row. It was obvious that they were in earnest, though goodness knows about what, as I could not make out any words. I was like a dog; I went by the tone of their voices. 

One of the young men struck another and he fell, his face covered in blood. The man who had struck him kicked him with full force and got down on him to punch him as hard as he could. He got in several very hard blows before some others hauled him off. If he had not been hauled off, I think he would have beaten him to death. I was very glad that neither of the two, the beater and the beaten, had a gun, for I am sure that in their heightened state of emotion, whatever it was about, one of them would have used a gun to kill. Of course, there will be those who say that if each of them had thought the other had a gun, they would not have fought in the first place.

It was strange to see cars crawl by this scene, the drivers obviously seeing what was going on but doing nothing about it. Some passersby passed by and others tried to intervene. More than one called the police. 

Oddly enough, once the man had been hauled off his prostrate associate (former friend? longtime enemy?), the group reformed and went up the street, still arguing furiously. A couple of shopkeepers came out to tell them to calm down, as the frightening fury was presumably bad for trade. 

This all continued for several minutes. The police never came. They probably had other things to do.

The Economics of ObamaCare

The “Unintended” But Entirely Predictable Effects

by Robert P. Murphy

Near the end of Human Action Ludwig von Mises declared that it was the “primary civic duty” to learn the teachings of economics. The public’s growing furor over the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act — popularly known as “ObamaCare” — beautifully illustrates Mises’s point. No one has any business being shocked — shocked! — that millions of Americans will lose their current health insurance (including the present, irritated, writer), because such an outcome was obvious all along. Furthermore, the hilarious snags with healthcare.gov are merely a sideshow; the true problems with ObamaCare run much deeper than a malfunctioning website.

The Basic Structure of “ObamaCare”

The Affordable Care Act (ACA) was formally signed into law on March 23, 2010. There are numerous provisions that kick in at various stages, through 2020. For our purposes in this article, there are four key elements of the ACA that merit our attention:

·         Insurers are legally required to provide coverage to all applicants, regardless of medical history, with a partial “community rating” system for premiums, which means that insurers must set premiums based (mostly) on geography and age, rather than sex and (most) pre-existing conditions.

·         Health insurance policies must meet minimum standards (called “essential health benefits”), including no caps on annual or lifetime payments from the insurance companies for an individual policy.

·         Everyone is required to obtain health insurance, except for waivers granted for certain religious groups and those deemed to be unable to afford coverage. Government subsidies and state-based “health exchange markets” will be provided to assist individuals.

·         An “employer mandate” penalizes firms with 50 or more employees if they do not offer coverage for their full-time employees, defined as those working 30 or more hours per week.

90 Years Ago: The End of German Hyperinflation

Unbacked paper money is political money and as such it is a disruptive element in a system of free markets

by Thorsten Polleit

On 15 November 1923 decisive steps were taken to end the nightmare of hyperinflation in the Weimar Republic: The Reichsbank, the German central bank, stopped monetizing government debt, and a new means of exchange, the Rentenmark, was issued next to the Papermark (in German: Papiermark). These measures succeeded in halting hyperinflation, but the purchasing power of the Papermark was completely ruined. To understand how and why this could happen, one has to take a look at the time shortly before the outbreak of World War I.

Since 1871, the mark had been the official money in the Deutsches Reich. With the outbreak of World War I, the gold redeemability of the Reichsmark was suspended on 4 August 1914. The gold-backed Reichsmark (or “Goldmark,” as it was referred to from 1914) became the unbacked Papermark. Initially, the Reich financed its war outlays in large part through issuing debt. Total public debt rose from 5.2bn Papermark in 1914 to 105.3bn in 1918.[1] In 1914, the quantity of Papermark was 5.9 billion, in 1918 it stood at 32.9 billion. From August 1914 to November 1918, wholesale prices in the Reich had risen 115 percent, and the purchasing power of the Papermark had fallen by more than half. In the same period, the exchange rate of the Papermark depreciated 84 percent against the US dollar.

The new Weimar Republic faced tremendous economic and political challenges. In 1920, industrial production was 61 percent of the level seen in 1913, and in 1923 it had fallen further to 54 percent. The land losses following the Versailles Treaty had weakened the Reich’s productive capacity substantially: the Reich lost around 13 percent of its former land mass, and around 10 percent of the German population was now living outside its borders. In addition, Germany had to make reparation payments. Most important, however, the new and fledgling democratic governments wanted to cater as best as possible to the wishes of their voters. As tax revenues were insufficient to finance these outlays, the Reichsbank started running the printing press.

From April 1920 to March 1921, the ratio of tax revenues to spending amounted to just 37 percent. Thereafter, the situation improved somewhat and in June 1922, taxes relative to total spending even reached 75 percent. Then things turned ugly. Toward the end of 1922, Germany was accused of having failed to deliver its reparation payments on time. To back their claim, French and Belgian troops invaded and occupied the Ruhrgebiet, the Reich’s industrial heartland, at the beginning of January 1923. The German government under chancellor Wilhelm Kuno called upon Ruhrgebiet workers to resist any orders from the invaders, promising the Reich would keep paying their wages. The Reichsbank began printing up new money by monetizing debt to keep the government liquid for making up tax-shortfalls and paying wages, social transfers, and subsidies.

Which bubbles will burst the worst?

It is only a question of time

  

By Martin Hutchinson 
Last week the hedge fund SAC was fined US$1.8 billion and will revert to running Steve Cohen's family money only - still a big job, since he's worth some $8-9 billion. This raises the question of which forms of investment will be exploded by the next market downturn, just as were subprime mortgages and complex securitizations by the 2008 unpleasantness. 

Guessing what the next downturn will look like and which forms of wealth will suffer permanent rather than temporary diminution in value is the most important task facing investors as we approach the top of the current bubble. 

After the 2000 bubble burst, the value downturn was almost entirely in equities, and a tiny subset of equities at that. While the main share indexes declined less than 50%, and were above their previous peaks within six years, the Nasdaq is still 13 years later more than 20% below its 2000 peak of 5,048, a loss of more than 40% when inflation is taken into account. 

For individual companies, the decline was more comprehensive. Microsoft (Nasdaq:MSFT) and Cisco (Nasdaq:CSCO) are both more than a third below their 2000 highs, even though their assets and profits are much greater than they were in 2000. Some companies have had much steeper falls; the switchgear specialist JDS Uniphase (Nasdaq:JDSU), valued well over $100 billion in 2000, now has a stock price of little more than 1% of its high, even though the company's operations remain solidly profitable and its P/E ratio is still elevated at 45 times earnings. Finally, a few companies that had taken excessive advantage of easy money and easy ethics went outright bankrupt, the most prominent being Enron, WorldCom and Global Crossing. 

Other types of asset saw only a modest downturn after 2000. Emerging market stocks had already been beaten down in 1997-98, so the 2000 crash saw only a hiccup in the beginnings of recovery. The hedge fund that had sold all its tech holdings in March 2000 and reinvested in Russia and Indonesia would have truly deserved its management's exorbitant fees. Gold and silver too were close to their bottom in 2000, and would prove an excellent investment over the next decade. 

JFK, Warmonger

His foreign policy was worse than George W. Bush’s

By JUSTIN RAIMONDO

Fifty years is long enough to mold history into mythology, but in the case of John Fitzgerald Kennedy it only took a decade or so. Indeed, long before Lyndon Johnson slunk off into the sunset, driven out of office by antiwar protestors and a rebellion inside his own party, Americans were already nostalgic for the supposedly halcyon days of Camelot. Yet the graceless LBJ merely followed in the footsteps of his glamorous predecessor: the difference, especially in foreign policy, was only in the packaging.

While Kennedy didn’t live long enough to have much of an impact domestically, except in introducing glitz to an office that had previously disdained the appurtenances of Hollywood, in terms of America’s stance on the world stage—where a chief executive can do real damage quickly—his recklessness is nearly unmatched.

As a congressman, Kennedy was a Cold War hardliner, albeit with a “smart” twist. After a 1951 trip to Southeast Asia he said the methods of the colonial French relied too much on naked force: it was necessary, he insisted, to build a political resistance to Communism that relied on the nationalistic sentiment then arising everywhere in what we used to call the Third World. Yet he was no softie. While the Eisenhower administration refused to intervene actively in Southeast Asia, key Democrats in Congress were critical of Republican hesitancy and Kennedy was in the forefront of the push to up the Cold War ante: “Vietnam represents the cornerstone of the Free World in Southeast Asia,” he declared in 1956, “the keystone to the arch, the finger in the dike.”

As Eisenhower neared the end of his second term, Democrats portrayed him as an old man asleep at the wheel. This narrative was given added force by the sudden appearance of a heretofore unheralded “missile gap”—the mistaken belief that the Soviets were out-running and out-gunning us with their ability to strike the United States with intercontinental ballistic missiles.

This storyline was advanced by two signal events: the 1957 launching of Sputnik, the first artificial satellite to go into orbit around the earth, and the equally successful testing of a Soviet ICBM earlier that summer. That November, a secret report commissioned by Eisenhower warned that the Soviets were ahead of us in the nuclear-weapons field. The report was leaked, and the media went into a frenzy, with the Washington Post averring the U.S. was in dire danger of becoming “a second class power.” America, the Post declared, stood “exposed to an almost immediate threat from the missile-bristling Soviets.” The nation faced “cataclysmic peril in the face of rocketing Soviet military might.”

The ugly misery of Bernanke's demagogy

Bernanke has locked the US into zero-interest rates and unlimited money growth

By Noureddine Krichene 
Only a government can destroy an economy. Only unrestrained demagogues in charge of key policy making can spread agony and misery. Back in the 1950s, professor Milton Friedman feared that a mad chairman could be in charge with the Federal Reserve (Fed) and play havoc with the United States economy. 

Although the US Constitution Article I, section 8, clause 5 provides: "The Congress shall have power ... to coin money, regulate the value thereof, and of foreign coin, and fix the standards of weights and measures ... [and clause 6:] to provide for the punishment of counterfeiting the securities and current coin of the United States", he urged constitutional laws that would restrain the discretionary power of a Fed chair and subject money supply to a fixed rule. 

Friedman along other economists such as Ludwig von Mises, Maurice Allais, and Lionel Robbins rejected any central bank intervention in the labor markets, fixing of interest rates, or stabilizing prices. While famous writers (eg, Mises, Ron Paul, and Murray Rothbard) strongly called for abolishing the Federal Reserve, others, including Friedman, called for restraining money supply to a fixed growth rate of 2%-4% regardless of the state of the economy. 

The prophecies and fear of Friedman have been fulfilled by the economic and money chaos of present Fed chairman Ben Bernanke's policies. 

With an unorthodox and inflexible mind, Bernanke forced inflationism as a key policy maker of the George W Bush administration. His cheap-money policy caused the worst financial crisis in post-war period and undermined the US and other key economies. Years of disorders and misery followed two decades of prosperity. In the United States, millions are unemployed; more than 50 million live on food stamps. Europe, Japan, and the US are all forced into reciprocal money destruction: the fight of the Kilkenny cats. 
Bernanke is not the first stubborn leftist who never renounces his ideology no matter how destructive his actions turn out to be. Recent history is full of leftist leaders who relentlessly devastated economies without renouncing their policies as long as they have the power to do so. It took decades of devastation before populations start to realize the false promises of statists. 

France Flirts with Fiscal Asphyxiation

Fiscal tinkering and dismal economic news appear to have a long life ahead in France

by Fabio Rafael Fiallo

To search for efficacy and coherence in the economic policy conducted by France's President Francois Hollande and Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault has become an arduous if not fruitless task. Welcome to 21st century France, where daily headlines detailing dismal employment numbers, factory closures and redundancy plans are edged out only by cases of government muddling and backpedaling.

President Hollande's woes stem, to a large extent, from the difficulty in reconciling his commitment to reduce by 2015 the public deficit to three percent of GDP with the pressure exerted by his political base to maintain France's profligate welfare state -- and an overall public spending that absorbs 57 percent of GDP (the highest ratio, along with Denmark, in the Eurozone).

Constrained by these political parameters, President Hollande and his prime minister have tried to shave France's public deficit by lavishly raising taxes and creating all kinds of new levies.

But then, confronted with the massive discontent that such measures have provoked among firms, farmers and households, the government has been obliged to backpedal and even capitulate on multiple occasions.

President Hollande recently gave the impression that he understood the malaise France is stuck in when, in August of this year, he announced a "fiscal pause" (a standstill on taxes) for 2014. In September, he went further and promised that there would be "no more tax increases" apart from those already in the pipeline.

The commitment proved to be short-lived. Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault corrected the president by stating that, in fact, the "fiscal pause" would have to wait until 2015. What's more, a new tax hike -- retroactive to 1997 -- was imposed on household savings, while a pro-environment levy on road transportation (ecotax) was programed to be collected as of January 1, 2014.

These new measures gave rise to large-scale protests that forced the government to backpedal in both cases.

The cocktail of tax increases and policy climbdowns has brought about an environment characterized by fiscal instability and economic uncertainty. Not surprisingly, firms are reluctant to invest and hire as they fret the arrival at any moment of a new fiscal blow that would damage their profitability.

Venezuela’s Maduro Channels Hitler with New Powers, Anti-Capitalist Propaganda

A new law to make Maduro the undisputed dictator of Venezuela very likely to pass 

BY SOBER LOOK

Today we start with a bit of history discussing the one key event which allowed Adolf Hitler to become the absolute dictator of Germany in 1933. It was a piece of legislation called The Enabling Act.

Wikipedia: — The Enabling Act (German: Ermächtigungsgesetz) was a 1933 amendment to the Weimar Constitution that gave the German Cabinet — in effect, Chancellor Adolf Hitler — the power to enact laws without the involvement of the Reichstag [the Parliament]…

The Enabling Act allowed the cabinet to enact legislation, including laws deviating from or altering the constitution, without the consent of the Reichstag.

The law was supposed to allow the cabinet to "cleanse" Germany from some corrupt and unwanted element and was meant to be temporary and used only on occasion. Here are some quotes from Hitler in reference to The Enabling Act:

By its decision to carry out the political and moral cleansing of our public life, the Government is creating and securing the conditions for a really deep and inner religious life…

The struggle against the materialistic ideology and for the erection of a true people's community (Volksgemeinschaft) serves as much the interests of the German nation as of our Christian faith…

The government will make use of these powers only insofar as they are essential for carrying out vitally necessary measures… The number of cases in which an internal necessity exists for having recourse to such a law is in itself a limited one…

[Hear More: Adam Fergusson — When Money Dies: A Comparison Between 1920's Weimar Germany and Today]

Of course as soon as The Enabling Act was passed, Reichstag effectively gave up all its powers.

Britain’s crazy prostitution laws

The UK’s array of prostitution laws only make things worse for sex workers

By LUKE GITTOS

Society seems to have a confused and ambivalent relationship with prostitutes. On the one hand, some argue that prostitution is the last vestige of employment for women who have been entirely subjugated beneath the will of a patriarchal society. For these people, mostly contemporary feminists, prostitutes are a ‘symptom’ of some deep patriarchal disease; they’re women who have placed themselves at the mercy of the sexual marketplace because they have no other option.

On the other hand, prostitution is celebrated as a trendy new sexuality, a symbol of feminine empowerment. At a time when being intimate is variously seen as uncool, dangerous, or emotionally ‘too much’, the fact that people sell sex like they would sell a television is seen as a funky and positive approach to modern sexual interactions. The popularity of TV dramas like Secret Diary of a Call Girl, in which Billie Piper plays a high-class prostitute getting into all sorts of scrapes in the process of prostituting herself, shows that many are happy to embrace prostitution as part of a new era of contemporary sexuality.

Of course, prostitution attracts both the ambitious and the desperate alike. But in England, the law which currently governs prostitution, resting on the idea that all prostitutes are vulnerable ‘sex workers’ in need of the state’s protection, is entirely harmful, and dangerously misrepresents a complex reality.

Prostitution itself is not illegal. However, the Sexual Offences Act of 2003 introduced an offence of ‘controlling’ prostitution. What does ‘controlling’ mean? According to the Court of Appeal it does not require the exercise of force or compulsion. In fact, a woman can be ‘controlled’ in prostitution even if she is ‘exercising free will’ when she chooses to prostitute herself.

In short, the offence punishes anyone who exerts any degree of ‘control’ whatsoever over a prostitute, even if that prostitute is choosing with absolute freedom to prostitute themselves. How is it that English law has moved to punish those who exercise even nominal ‘control’ over a person’s activities, without punishing the activity itself?